Nonprofit Web Sites on the Cheap

Last Friday, TechSoup's Chris Peters and I spent our day at a one-day conference for nonprofits and community organizers from Northern California who desperately needed help figuring out how to get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. What we found though, was that the crowd was more of a Web 0.8 audience in that most didn't have a Web site of any kind and nearly all were still sending emails to their supporters via a personal email account on Yahoo or AOL rather than using an email distribution service or tool.

I know all too well — from being on the poor end of the nonprofit spectrum in the past — that "basics" like having a brochure Web site and a tool to help send out email blasts to lists can be hard to come by when you've got no money, no training, and no technical staff in your sometimes-all-volunteer organization.

With that in mind, here are a few highlights from both the presentation and discussion panel that many of the participants found useful. Hat tip to Chris for pulling together most of the resources on this list in advance too!

Places to Start

• Web Design from Scratch describes current best practices and is a useful place to find comprehensive info on the basic questions to consider when planning your site.
• Grassroots.org can try to match you with a volunteer Web designer. They also have a Web design toolkit for their nonprofit members which includes domain registration, Web building software, and free site hosting.
• Techfinder.org and Idealist.org are also good sources for search for nonprofit tech volunteers to help.
• Nonprofit Soapbox is a low-cost Joomla content management system (CMS) installation for nonprofits.

Web Sites "In a Box"

There are a variety of online tools, both free and low-cost, that provide template and layout options and you simply fill in the blanks and create pages. These are low-maintenance and easy to use, but don't often provide much customization or flexibility and can look like cookie-cutter designs you've seen everywhere else. Some of these tools include:

• Homestead
• Weebly
• Blogger
• Synthasite
• Doodlekit (free with Grassroots.org account)

Content Management Systems

A CMS is database-driven software that can make it an easy task to update pages and create Web sites without knowing any technical HTML, though the initial setup is more advanced than the site "in the box" options above. They also usually offer greater functionality, plug-ins, add-ons, or customizations. Here are a few listed from easiest to most advanced:

• Typepad
• Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org (This is my personal favorite for free site design with lots of free or inexpensive plug-ins. You can see a site I built for my sister in only a couple of hours here. She updates and maintains it completely on her own at this point and she's had no technical training.)
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Plone
• Proprietary — a variety of options from different vendors and companies.

Web Authoring Tools and HTML Editors

These again are listed from most basic (and easiest) to most savvy and difficult to learn.

• Kompozer
• Coffee Cup
• HTML Kit
• Adobe Contribute
• MS Expression Web (discounted at TechSoup Stock)
• Adobe Dreamweaver

These are just a handful of the myriad options available to nonprofits when seeking the right tool to create an inexpensive Web site. I have my personal favorites, and I'm sure others have their own recommendations. The best way to determine what will work best for your needs is to sign up and try them out since most are free to at least test. Best of luck!